Thursday, September 26, 2013

·A
friend at lunch, leaning over and asking if I might be going to New York soon,
so that I could deliver a morin khuur to her son, a giant horsehead guitar that
supposedly makes a sound like a horse neighing.

·Me
taking a giant spill along the Liangmehe canal, after momentarily losing my
concentration in staring at a woman with bright purple hair. Her yippy little
dog barking at me, as she barely pauses to make sure I’m not dead.

·Achieving
a whopping 182 in bowling, with five strikes and about four spares.

·Bouncing
around in the crisp fall air on various bicycle rickshaws, and a ride in one in
the rain where I liked the fact that I couldn’t see outside the quilted red
blanket that covered the entire seating area. No need to see the danger.

·Marching
past all the Chinese citizens lined up outside the U.S. embassy looking for
tourist visas, and feeling privileged just by being able to wave that precious
blue passport book.

·Strolling
the grounds of Biyun Temple (Temple of Azure Clouds) outside Beijing on a day
when the clouds were puffy like cotton and the sky was azure.

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Yesterday I began the process of trying to understand the
steps it would take to get Smudge safely repatriated. I know, we have a good
long time before we head back to our beloved Meiguo (13 months, 8 days, but
who’s counting?), but I figured that if there’s one thing I learned in China,
it’s the power of Murphy’s Law. If something is going to go wrong, it will, and
at the least convenient time at the greatest expense.

Faithful readers will recall the expensive and elaborate
process that it took to smuggle Smudge into the Middle Kingdom to avoid
quarantine, a process that involved hiring a very expensive pet relocation
company that gave us decent advice but not much else, flying to Seoul and
staying overnight in a somewhat seedy pet-friendly hotel near the airport,
flying to quarantine-free Tianjin and marching through immigration like it was
nothing, and then driving (thank you, Mr. Dou) to Beijing in the Wall Street
Journal’s car. And then locking poor Smudge in the bathroom. For the record, I
believe she has forgiven me for that.

Here in Season’s Park, Smudge spends about 50 percent of her
time under our Ikea armchair (where I’ve helpfully put a little pillow for
her), 20 percent of her time staring at me (making me wonder if she is a spy),
10 percent of her time eating rather unenthusiastically, 10 percent drinking
water from the toilet, five percent looking out at the Siberian magpies and
pink-dyed poodles that pass by below, and 5 percent just doing that cat thing
of staring off into space, preferably on my lap, even on days when it’s 100
degrees outside.

Getting her home seems slightly easier than getting her
here, even at her advanced age of 15. I got all the details from the
ever-helpful Mary Peng at Beijing’s International Center for Veterinary
Services. In a free seminar, “Exiting from China with Pets,” she detailed the
process of convincing China to let my kitty go (when it’s not entirely clear
they even know she’s here).

First order of business, making sure she’s in good health.
Mary told a scary story of a family she knew who had lived in Beijing with
their beagle, had faithfully taken the beagle in to the clinic for his
vaccinations, but had declined the blood work. With a week to go, they brought
him in for his Chinese health examination to find out he had diabetes and the
Chinese decided that he couldn’t leave in case his blood work was also evidence
of other, possibly infectious diseases. The family left without the poor dog,
who stayed with friends until someone in the family could come back and fetch
him after his blood sugar got back to normal. Moral of story: Never leave
things until the last minute, especially not in China. Plus, don’t get
diabetes.

Since Smudge is elderly and has a toilet water addiction, I
need to have her examined. So I’ll make an appointment, get her examined, and,
at the same time, have the clinic insert a microchip in her shoulder (needed
for departure from Beijing) and a rabies vaccination. The rabies test needs to
be done within a year of leaving, so I’m waiting on all that until December of
this year to be on the safe side.

I may have started feeling slightly panicky at this point in
the talk, but I certainly seemed to have fewer problems than the young woman
who wanted to bring her husky to Taiwan, which basically doesn’t allow anyone
to bring in animals at any time, it seems, and especially not from the People’s
Republic of China.

Which brings me to Smudge’s political affiliations. When she
gets her rabies shot in December, she will be given a Little Red Book of
vaccination records, otherwise known as the official Beijing Animal Health and
Immunity Certificate. I don’t think she’ll be expected to quote from it,
though.

After she gets all healthy and up to date on her shots, we
wait until 7-10 days before our departure, when we have to show up at the
“government-run Entry-Exit Inspection & Quarantine Bureau animal hospital,”
a place that takes no appointments and that runs on government hours: 8:30-4:30,
with a big chunk of time in the middle of the day off for lunch. No one there
speaks English, of course, but Mary assured us that we could show up with our
pet and they’d know what to do. Hmmmmm. If I had a kuai for every time I
trusted that things would not go wrong, I’d be rich. I think I’ll bring a Chinese-speaker
with me.

Assuming Smudge passes her tests, she gets a certificate for
exit, which, with a “concierge service” costing about 300 RMB can be delivered
to your home, allows her to leave.

That, of course, leaves one other wild card and that is the
flight. We’ll need to make sure United will allow us to carry our cat in the
cabin, because they’re one airline that doesn’t let you check the animal as “excess
baggage,” which would mean they go in a special area of the cargo on your
flight. Instead, being the totally
service-intensive airline they always are, United insists that if you’re not
bringing your animal into the cabin, you must check your animal as
unaccompanied freight, marked as “live animals.” You leave them overnight in
some warehouse, and yada yada. I’d rather change airlines and fly through
Pyongyang than do that.

So, if all goes well, we’ll get on that direct
Beijing-Dulles flight with Smudge in the cabin, doing what she’s done on our
Brussels sojourn and then coming here to China: looking up at me with doleful
eyes and not making a sound.

Mary had a cat that wailed for four hours from Beijing to
Tokyo, making her vow never to take a cat in the cabin with her again. Smudge
isn’t that kind of cat. But I wouldn’t be surprised if having a microchip
implanted in China, a little red book, and the habit of watching me around the
clock means I’m actually bringing home a little red spy. I mean, what IS in
that toilet water?

Sunday, September 15, 2013

I’m starting to learn to read Chinese characters,
and it’s been a fun, if demanding, exercise. It seems as if every time I work
out in my head a reason to remember a certain character – “okay, that has a
mouth character in it, so it probably has something to do with speaking” – I am
stymied by a character that seems to have absolutely nothing – NOTHING – to do
with its reality.

The word “ball” is a perfect example. You might
think that the character would have something round in it. Nope. The character
for ball is: 球.

Yes,
I know. Looks like a ball, right?

But,
despite all odds, I’m starting to pick my way through my textbook, “New
Practical Chinese Reader.” It’s not as fun-sounding as my previous book, “Kuaile
Hanyu,” or Happy Chinese, with its pictures of children running through parks,
kicking soccer balls, playing ping pong, going to concerts. This next book is
just…practical.

But
something in reading characters is starting to make sense, especially if I read
them in context, rather than trying to identify characters from a game on my
ipad, where they just appear randomly. And even the practical book has a couple
of ongoing characters. There’s Ma Dawei, a 22-year-old American student, who
wears a somewhat creepy trench coat with a mug of something in one hand and the
other hand in his pocket. And then there’s Lin Na, a 19-year-old British
student wearing slouchy boots and carrying some kind of shoulder bag. There are
others, too, but these are the names I most easily recognize.

The
reading is exactly like the kind of reading I did when I first learned to read
English. Then I would sit on Christine’s front steps, and we would pore over
our Dick and Jane books. “See Spot run. Run, Spot, run!” There was this magical
moment where it started to make sense and we started to devour books, one after
the other.

Here
in Beijing, I’m happy to read just basic stuff. Here’s about the level of
character-reading I can do these days (translated into English, of course):

Lin Na, how are you?

I’m very good, how are you?

I’m also good.

These are not profound thoughts, and the chapters that
follow move on to important topics like whether their professor is busy, who
wants to drink coffee, do you want to eat something (a crucial topic in China),
and what country someone is from (an even more important topic).

I’m wondering, though, when we’ll get to humor. There
was a rather brilliant moment in the Dick and Jane books when their cat, Puff,
was perched on the television set.

“Jane, look! Puff is on TV!” says the ever-playful
Dick. (Dick would never wear a trench coat and keep his hand in his pocket.)

Jane, of course, comes running, and sees that Puff
is on top of the TV, but not “on TV” literally. It was the first actual joke I
ever read, and I remember feeling blown away by the clever word play and my equally monumental brilliance for understanding it.

I am light years from this stage here in China. If
the “xiao mao” ever climbs on top of the “dianshi,” it’ll be a miracle. Our TV
is flat screen, and Smudge’s adventurous days are long over. Plus, I haven’t
learned the characters yet for cat or TV. But maybe soon.

Sunday, September 8, 2013

Just back
in Beijing after a three-week visit to the U.S., I can't help but catalog the
variety of places and things I've done. In fact, I've been telling people it
could almost be a "Best of America" tour, if such a thing is
possible, and if one could actually pick a best out of so many treasures.

Let's
start with the locations: lake and seaside Maine; Hudson Valley and Catskills
of upstate New York; Washington, DC; Denver and the Rockies; and Chapel Hill,
North Carolina.

And
the little ones: my cousin Maria's sweet Quinn and Declan; the Davis kiddos,
all five darlings, all five perfect; Sufi, with his easy smiles and extroverted
personality.

And
the experiences: two bonfires (hat tip Tom Bruno and Josh O'Leary); one wedding
(elegant and beautiful Tricia); swimming in one lake and one pool (hat tip Lori
Bruno and Jennifer Taylor); one Rocky Mountain drive through a pelting
hailstorm; one latke bake off; one afternoon of corn hole; jogs by the Hudson
River, the Susquehanna river, the pine-scented hills of Chapel Hill; and to the
Iwo Jima memorial in DC; a chance to toss a nickel on the grave of Buffalo
Bill; a look inside the home of Thomas Cole; being in Washington on the 50th
anniversary of the March on Washington; putting a large decal tree on the wall
of Daniel's apartment.

I've
spent time on three college campuses: my own Oneonta, looking spiffy and
landscaped; beautiful University of Denver, with its red rock buildings and
curving sidewalks; and even more beautiful UNC, with its ancient trees and
colonial brick buildings, southern charm at its best.

As
always, I've been just overwhelmed with the generosity of friends and family
who have picked me up from airports, put me up, fed me, and taken time to have
a breakfast, coffee, lunch, drinks, or dinner with me.

I
haven't had much time to write or study Chinese, and there's a new baby who
just joined our Beijing "family," so I'm also looking forward to
getting back to my life in China (and especially to wow Smudge with the 20 cans
of cat food I've brought her. I'm sure she'll be grateful.), but this break has
been everything a vacation should be: relaxing, fun, caloric, with plenty of
time and laughs with people who mean so much to me.